What's the best affordable email marketing software you've seen?

I need an economical email marketing service to host, deliver and track the response to our marketing messages. Ideally, I'd like to know which recipients have opened the message, which have responded and what areas they've clicked on within the HTML mail message. Can you suggest vendors who can do this?

Anne: How many "contacts" do you have on your list. Most plans charge by the number of contacts. Some charge by the total number of contacts, some by the contacts per list (which means you pay for duplicates if a single contact is on multiple lists due to your segmentation activities). As both Ray and Gee indicated, most email service providers will meet your functional requirements. I have used MailChimp successfully but switched to ActiveCampaign because of the marketing automation functionality that you can leverage. It also only charges for total contacts and allows you to use tagging to segment your lists so you can have the same individual on multiple lists and only have to pay for the contact (email address) once.

We're starting out with just 500 contacts, though we hope to grow the list. (Our first task is an email blast to that list, but we hope to grow the list as quickly as we can.) BTW, I've tried MailChimp but find it to be quite confusing to use or I'd start there.

I'm going to give ActiveCampaign a look. Sounds like there are some advantages to it.

Anne: If you do go with Active Campaign, join the Facebook group, Automation Nation. The group is very active and it's members are really helpful when it comes to overcoming challenges you may run into.

Anne, rather than start a new answer, I will weigh in and back up Scott 100% on ActiveCampaign. It is a bigger investment in learning than Mailchimp, ConstantContact, Aweber, etc, but if you plan to grow your business in sophistication as well as scale, it's the better solution at the same basic price point. And if you've never used a simple email marketing platform like those, you won't have as much re-learning if you start with ActiveCampaign.

And I also endorse Scott's recommendation of Automation Nation. Very welcoming and Barry is a great host there. Lots of good advice to. ActiveCampaign's new head of communicating how the platform works (Can't remember Chris's new title) is active there too.

I moved up from MailChimp to ActiveCampaign in January and consider the time spent the best business investment I've made this year - and the cost is not significantly different.

MailChimp can do all of this, and more. You can even get alerts and stats to your phone from the MailChimp app.

Regarding pricing, there's a "forever free" plan (up to 2,000 recipients/12,000 emails per month) in return for having a MailChimp logo on all your sent mails. They also do a "pay as you go" plan at $0.03c per mail without the MailChimp branding.

We've tried various other providers over the years (Constant Contact, Aweber, Vertical Response, GetResponse, Sendy, even InfusionSoft) but keep coming back to MailChimp.

Anne, if the MailChimp documentation doesn't help, They have a pretty extensive support section with how-to's, videos, and best practice guidelines. Once you have an account, there's also email support and a 'live chat' system that can answer most questions.

Gee, I wanted to say that I did choose to go with Mail Chimp for the series of campaigns I am running. I found getting started to be quite challenging -- and leaned heavily on tech support -- but now I feel comfortable with the basics. Thanks again for your suggestion!

FYI, however, I want to warn you that email support and live chat support are no longer available for free accounts. I had them for a few weeks and then suddenly, without notice, they simply removed them as an option.

As far as I know most all of the email marketing providers can do what you are asking for. I used to use Constant Contact and switched a while back to Robly. They have more features than Constant Contact for about half the price. One of the things that I like is they have a set up where you can give your email two different titles. It will send the email out with the first title and then resend only to the ones who didn't open the first email but this time using the second title. That feature seems to add 8-10% additional openings to my email campaigns. Of course I also like that the cost is half as much as I was paying.

HI Ray, this was a really good comment. And the tactics use to increase rate email openings is just a nice idea. Most email marketing provider doesn't allow this option, excep that you replicate the email with another tittle. I gonna check Robly too, thanks.

Affordable in terms of cost or affordable in terms of the capabilities you need? There is a big difference between the two.

As noted elsewhere, MailChimp has a free version that might work for new users.

The next question is how large is your email list? Most vendors will do what you need, but pricing depends on the size of your list and the added features you need.

There are many different flavors of apps to do email marketing. The best solution is to use Google and search for reviews and comparisons. Many have a short free trial to check it out.

As I said, MailChimp is at the low end of the spectrum. Zoho, AWeber and GetResponse are pretty good and they are at the low end of the price spectrum. Midrange products are Hatchbuck and ActiveCampaign. The top end, most expensive are OntraPort, InfusionSoft and Pardot. But there are many others in each category, so don't just look at these.

As someone else has said, most email marketing tools will do those things. The cheapest one I've found, even after upgrading (MailChimp can get quite expensive beyond their free service), is MadMimi. Bad name, good product with lots of extra features. Very easy to use too.

Hi - we have great packages for our email marketing software if you are interested. Our software has a 14 day trial period and works either on how many emails you send per month, or how many subscribers you have. You can pay monthly or annually which is cheaper. You can upgrade to the next package at any time. It is fully mobile responsive with drag and drop easy to use email layouts and ready made templates. It has segmenting and loads of features. If you are after CRM capabilities it has that too, on the higher end packages. If you are considering this as a solution for email marketing for yourself or for your clients and would like to trial it, please contact me.

Hey Anne, as per your requirement I would like to suggest you Easysendy Pro which is very cost effective and offers a lot to do. It is a hybrid email marketing tool which is very user-friendly and offers more than 10 SMTP relays. Delivering email through multiple SMTP relay server improves email inbox delivery and enhances email open rate, which results in improved ROI on email marketing.

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